How many TV shows could pull off having their main character be both the protagonist and the villain of the same episode, while being played by three different actors?

Saturday’s 50th Anniversary Special of Doctor Who aims for two lofty goals: to celebrate the show’s history, and to deliver a story with some kind of change and growth for its leads. On the first score, it is, in a word, fantastic. Pretty much the entire thing falls under the category of fan service—David Tennant and Billie Piper are back! We get to see the Last Great Time War! That UNIT scientist is wearing a Fourth Doctor-ish scarf! We find out why Queen Elizabeth I was so mad at the Tennant’s Tenth Doctor at the end of “The Shakespeare Code”! And OMG TOM BAKER!

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As for the story, it’s a fun romp that hits some strong emotional notes and does show our hero(es) making some life-altering choices. Previous multi-Doctor stories have been notoriously not very good, even by the production-value standards of their respective eras. “The Day of the Doctor” sailed over that bar with light years to spare. The plot actually gets set in motion by a rather banal scheme by a rather banal, C-list Who monster, the Zygons, who hid themselves in paintings until Earth proved itself worthy of invasion by developing streaming video and the iPhone 5.

But the true bad guy of this story isn’t the Zygons: It’s the long-unmentioned (OK, retconned) version of the Doctor played by John Hurt.

At the 2005 restart of the series, previous showrunner Russell T. Davies wrote out the Doctor’s mostly pompous and boring people, the Time Lords, by having the Doctor destroy both them and their archenemies the Daleks to bring an end to the Last Great Time War. While most people assumed that it was the Eighth Doctor who had fought in the Time War, and then regenerated soon after into the Ninth (c.f., Christopher Eccleston checking himself out in a mirror in his first episode and exclaiming, “Look at the ears!”), current executive producer and head writer Steven Moffat inserted a character of his own invention into that blank space, Hurt’s “War Doctor.” It turns out that Hurt’s guy was the one who used a weapon called The Moment (first referenced in “The End of Time,” the final episode for both Tennant and for Davies as showrunner) to destroy both sides in the Time War.

In addition to throwing his own version of the Doctor into this wartime scenario, Moffat also added an intriguing twist: The Moment is sentient and has a conscience. Reaching into his future memories (it’s a Time Lord invention, pretty easy to accept), The Moment appears in the form of Rose Tyler, companion to both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors.

Even though she isn’t the real Rose, she acts like her, playfully mocking Hurt’s portentous declaration, “No more.” (She always used to take the piss out of Nine and Ten like that.) And in a weird way, Moffat’s choice here—that an entity trying to steer the Doctor towards becoming his best self would show up as Rose—confirms her status as the most important companion he’s ever had.

So, Moment/Rose acts as Ghost of Doctors Yet to Come to Hurt’s very Scrooge-like War Doctor: She creates time tunnels to drop him in to meet not only the Eleventh Doctor, who’s investigating the back end of the Zygon plot in the 21st century, but the Tenth, who’s on the trail of its inception in the 16th.

For lots of fans, it’s Tennant’s presence that makes this special a special. And he has plenty of fun moments in this one, including using an improvised machine that goes “ding” and making the old “Oncoming Storm” speech at a fluffy bunny rabbit. Whether he’s being funny-technobabbly Doctor or Time War-angsty Doctor, he’s a joy to watch.

But ultimately, his role here is the most fan-servicey. We know exactly where he is in his own arc—procrastinating facing his doom between “The Waters of Mars” and “The End of Time”—and we know, as Ood Sigma would put it, how his song ends.

The best part of any multi-Doctor story is always watching the Doctor talk to himself. Two and Three bickered quite amusingly—and believably—in both “The Three Doctors” and “The Five Doctors.” Smith and Tennant go in for a bit of that sort of banter, in a predictably Moffaty assign-a-nickname-based-on-physical-appearance way (“Chinny” just isn’t very funny), and also measure their dicks, er sonic screwdrivers (more Moffatry). But mostly they get along quite well.

In introducing the War Doctor to two of his future selves, Moment/Rose seems to hope that the pair will serve as Manic Pixie Dream Boys to have some kind of salutary effect on the War Doctor. Casting an older actor in the War Doctor role works quite well on a metacommentary level, with Hurt offering deliciously gruff imprecations about his successors’ youthful looks (“Am I having a midlife crisis?”), infantile prattle (“Timey-wimey?!”), snogging (“Is there a lot of this in the future?”), and tendency to wave their sonic screwdrivers around like weapons and/or magic wands (“What are you going to do, assemble a cabinet at them?”)—all of which are complaints that fans of Classic Who have voiced about the revived show over the years.

Among Moffat’s more annoying writerly tics is his love of hanging labels on his characters—The Girl Who This, The Boy Who That. Generally, that’s the worst kind of telling rather than showing. But when Rose dubs the War Doctor’s future selves as “The Man Who Regrets” (Ten) and “The Man Who Forgets” (Eleven), it kind of works—especially if, like me, you see Eleven’s tendency to live in a continual present as having stagnated his character as his tenure has worn on.

Eleven’s scheme is breathlessly zany, and its frenetic execution crosses the event horizon from fan service into fan wank.

And that’s where Ten does have one key thematic note to hit, beyond the fan service: He counted the number of children he killed when he destroyed Gallifrey, and is horrified to learn that Eleven has forgotten that he did so. But then after mostly living in denial of his role in the Time War for a few hundred years, Eleven—with Clara (Jenna Coleman) acting as his conscience, much as Rose has acted as the War Doctor’s—declares, “I’ve changed my mind.”

Eleven’s scheme to hide his home world of Gallifrey rather than destroy it is breathlessly zany, and its frenetic execution crosses the event horizon from fan service into fan wank when all of the Doctor’s incarnations appear in their TARDISes to help with the plan—including a glimpse of Peter Capaldi, the Doctor who will succeed Matt Smith in this year’s Christmas special. This makes absolutely no sense—I guess Moment/Rose is responsible?—but it’s a fun homage to the Classic Doctors.

Speaking of which, the episode treats fans to a coda in which Tom Baker, the actor who played the Fourth Doctor, has a touching little scene with Matt Smith’s Eleventh. That moment signals that Smith and his successor could hold out hope of perhaps actually seeing Gallifrey again. As a torch-passer, this works far better than the Leonard Nimoy-Zachary Quinto scenes in the rebooted Star Trek movies.

Neither Fifth Doctor Peter Davison nor Seventh Doctor Sylvester “Radagast” McCoy make an appearance beyond archival footage, (Eighth Doctor Paul McGann got a cool web mini-episode, and Sixth Doctor Colin Baker did the voice-over for the making-of featurette that followed the special at the in-theater simulcast), but by far the most conspicuous absentee is Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston. The last shot of John Hurt shows him inside his TARDIS, beginning to regenerate … and then we cut away before he becomes Eccleston. A short scene of Nine coming to his senses, scanning for Gallifrey and not finding it, would have been both a colossal gift to fans and made it clear that Nine’s defining characteristics—his Time War PTSD and survivor guilt—had not been wiped away by the events of “The Day of the Doctor.” But we didn’t get that, and I missed Eccleston’s daft old face.

As for the non-Doctor characters in the special, most of them are women, and, perhaps surprisingly given Moffat’s track record on this front, they mostly come off well. Jemma Redgrave returns as Kate Stewart and plays her with poise, grace, and authority. Ingrid Oliver as UNIT scientist Osgood is amiably adorkable as a fan surrogate. Joanna Page as Queen Elizabeth I is suitably… Elizabethan, I guess? And she gets to kill a Zygon with a dagger. Now, Eleven does essentially call Stewart stupid (an unfortunate echo of Ten’s treatment of Harriet Jones, Prime Minister in “The Christmas Invasion”), and Elizabeth’s over-the-top affection for Ten is a bit uncomfortably played for laughs, but in the Moffat Sexist Nonsense Hall of Shame, these count as minor quibbles.

And what about Clara? I’m one of many who’ve been disappointed in the paper-thin pluckiness that has passed for characterization with the Eleventh Doctor’s latest companion. Happily, we get a bit more substance from her in the special. Her quick thinking and common sense in getting the Doctors out of the Tower of London is quite Martha Jones-ish, and her plea with Eleven to not go through with the double genocide directly calls back to Donna Noble getting Ten to save somebody, anybody from doomed Pompeii (as was having all three Doctors put their hands on The Moment’s big red button). We still don’t know much about who Clara actually is, but baby steps are better than no steps at all.

I had the pleasure of watching the 3-D simulcast in a theater crowded with Whovians, and it sounded like everyone liked it at least as much as I did. They doffed their fezzes, waved their scarves, brandished their sonics and celery sticks, wobbled their wibblies and timey’d their wimeys. The Rivers and Roses and Amys and the wee little Elevens, the female Two and the African-American Ten, the Empty Child and Liz 10—all of Who-ville thrummed with excitement before, during, and after the show.

I also confirmed that I’m far from the only one who has a … nuanced view of the current showrunner. The enthusiastic woman to my right was engrossed through the whole thing, whooping at the reappearances of Piper and Tennant, guffawing at the sonic-measuring contest between Ten and Eleven, and hollering at the archival-footage appearances of all 13 Doctors.

And then, when the making-of featurette started and the curly-haired visage of Steven Moffat appeared on screen, she booed.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.